Table of Contents:
Introduction
Step 1: Know Thyself
Step 2: Know Your Customer
Step 3: Determine Your Content Marketing Goals
Step 4: Search Engine Optimization
Step 5: Perform a Content Inventory
Step 6: Content Mapping
Step 7: Creating Content
Step 8: The Right Content in the Right Channel
Step 9: Measuring Your Content Strategy’s Success
Some Final Thoughts
With your content strategy in motion, now you can begin the never-ending task of measuring, tweaking, and measuring again. But what exactly should you measure and what should be considered a good result?
Here’s the answer you’ve been waiting for; it depends. Seriously, your results and the measurement of success and failure you attach to those results are entirely based on the goals you set out back in Step 5. If you were doing zero PPC advertising and you start devoting $100 a week to it, any new traffic thanks to your paid ad campaigns yields at least 100X results.
The best measurements for successful content marketing break down as shown below, though there are many more measurements you can look at as your metrics get more mature.
Web page and blog post success metrics:
Traffic – net how many visitors you had to the page. By itself, this number just tells you how easily your content was found. But there’s a lot more to the story.
Visitors (new vs. returning) – this tells you how many of your total “Traffic” number included people who came back to your digital property after a previous visit. Again, a good number to know but only a starting point.
Bounce Rate – how many visitors came to your page and decided it wasn’t what they were looking for. If this number is high, then you either have a problem with your SEO keywords and phrases bringing people who were looking for something else or the information you have on the page they came to, doesn’t align with the search terms/ads they clicked on to get here. If this number stays high week after week, search platforms will penalize your site rankings and ads.
Exit Rate – Sounds the same as Bounce doesn’t it? Exit Rate just tells you that the page was the last one your guests saw. If you have a Call To Action on a page with a high Exit rate, that means your guests are not clicking on it and moving on to the next page in the customer journey and you need to find out why.
Page Views and Page Visits – they sound the same but they are very different. For Google, a Page Visit represents a single property, for instance, a web site. If you look at five different pages (URLs) on my website domain, that’s just a single “Page Visit” but it counts as five Page Views.
Traffic Sources – tells you where your visitors came from. This is extremely important if you’re running ad campaigns on multiple properties.
Online paid advertising success metrics:
Total Spend – as it says, this tells you how much money was spent displaying ads to your target audience. Most platforms allow you to set a limit on your spending. If you hit your limit early, then maybe you need to up your limit. Then again, if you hit your limit and you aren’t seeing the results you wanted once your visitors clicked through to your digital properties, then you may have a problem elsewhere, such as your SEO or the content on your properties. If you didn’t hit your limit, then you may not be targeting the right keywords or your targeting might be too strict.
Impressions – indicates how many times your ad was shown to viewers. In itself, this isn’t much of a measurement other than to give you a warm fuzzy that the property is showing your ad to your target audience. However, if your total impressions are very low, but you believe the audience for your keywords is large, then you probably need to rethink your keywords and/or targeting parameters.
Click-through Rate (CTR) – measures how many of the Impressions resulted in someone clicking on your ad. A high CTR means your ad resonated. From here, follow the breadcrumbs and see what happened once they hit your digital property. If they stayed and read more content, or even clicked on a CTA, that means you’re doing a good job moving prospects along their journey.
Conversion Rate – is a mathematical calculation of how well your ad campaign is performing. To set this up, you’ll need to do a bit of prep work in your Google Analytics (GA) account in the form of setting up Goals. Goals tell GA what to consider a conversion. For instance, if someone clicks through your ad on Google, reads all about the new analyst report you built a landing page for, and then fills out the registration form to receive a copy of the report from you, then that registration form completion is a “Goal” you set up in GA. If your Conversion rate is low, you may need to look at factors such as the offer (is it sweet enough to cause the visitor to give up their contact information) or its relevance to the ad the visitor clicked on. Keep in mind that for search result ads, a good PPC conversion rate is approximately 4 percent. Depressing isn’t it?
Quality Score – this mysterious measurement, used by all major browsing engines, uses a proprietary mix of measurements to assign a score to each of your ads. It uses that score to determine how much to charge you for each ad, and where in the search results your ad appears (A higher Quality Scores put your ad closer to the top of the results). Some factors generally believed to impact your Quality Score include: how well your ad keywords match the content the visitor sees when they click on the ad, the actual page or content people see when they click on your ad, your CTR, and the historical performance of your ads overall. As you can imagine, your Quality Score builds over time, so don’t ever slack.
Email marketing success metrics:
Open Rate – tells you how many readers clicked on the email to view it. This also includes email clients that offer a preview where the body of the email is shown in a pane without any action by the reader. So keep in mind that your Open Rate and the actual number of people who at least glanced over your email could be very different.
Click-Through Rate (CTR) – offers a better measurement of the effectiveness of your email marketing programs. Ideally, every email you send includes a CTA, else you won’t be able to measure your CTR.
Opt-out Rate (a.k.a., Unsubscribe) – tells you how many people are choosing to no longer receive your email. If this number is consistently high or even increasing, then you may need to consider the type of content you’re delivering, or even when you’re delivering the content if you’re using Drip Marketing or other advanced touch-point marketing programs.
Delivery Rate – your delivery rate can indicate problems in several areas and bears watching. If your Delivery Rate is high (95% or higher) then your lists are up-to-date and your delivery service is doing a good job. If your Delivery Rate is low once, maybe it was just a glitch. If it’s consistently low, then you probably have a lot of old email addresses (~30% of email addresses turn over every year), or maybe your email service delivery company has issues. Also, keep an eye on the domains that aren’t delivered. This can tell you if there is a problem with a company’s email server, which would impact your rate through no fault of your own.
Social media success metrics:
Amplification Rate – is a measure of how much your posts and content were shared. Likes (a.k.a., Applause rate) are great, but they are largely a vanity metric. It’s the Amplification Rate that’s going to boost your content to success heights.
Conversion Rate – similar to Conversion Rate on your other digital properties, this measures how effective your social posts are in getting viewers to take the desired action.
Return on Investment – tells you how much all of the effort you put into your social media campaigns (employee costs, advertising costs, cost to create the content, and about ten other things) yields in terms of actual business value. This is a very mature measurement, but if you want to prove the value of your social media efforts, it’s worth measuring. Rather than trying to cover how to calculate social media ROI, check out Hootsuite’s guide on measuring social media ROI here.
Other types of content success metrics:
Other major content categories include videos, webinars, podcasts, eBooks, brochures, and other sales enablement. Generally, what you want to measure are the “consume” metrics. Did they download the content, or watch most of the video, or listen to most of the podcast. Subscribing rates are great metrics as well.
A note on measuring the success of webinars and podcasts: Two measurements I see time and again held up as an indicator of success are registrations and subscribers.
Here’s a question: How many webinars have you signed up for and never attended or even went back and watched? Probably more than you have actually watched.
Yet, too often marketers hold up high registration or subscriber numbers as a success metric; usually to people who aren’t paying attention to the small details. And that’s wrong. The metrics you want to track include:
- Actual attendees – how many people showed up to consume the content.
- Average time on page (i.e., how long did they stay and listen)
- Downloads. Over time, this can add up and make a podcast or webinar that had poor attendance, turn out to be one of your best-performing pieces of content.
- Conversion. If you can track customers from the first time they come to one of your digital properties through the sales cycle, you might find that one of the five people who attended your webinar three months ago, turned out to be one of your best long-term customers.
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